Jonah Lehrer’s Journalistic Misdeeds at Wired.com

Slate ^ | August 31, 2012 | Charles Seife

[Cincinatus' Wife]

For the past three months, Jonah Lehrer, science journalist, author of three books, and (former) New Yorker staff writer has been under siege. In mid-June, he was accused of recycling his old work and publishing it as new. Since then, a number of accounts assert that Lehrer committed the two mortal sins of journalism: fabrication and plagiarism.

Before Lehrer joined The New Yorker, he was one of the premier bloggers at Wired.com; the site still boasts several hundred blog posts he wrote for his Frontal Cortex blog. Quite naturally, when the Lehrer scandal first broke, the editors at Wired.com worried that his work for them was tainted as well.

That's where I came in. I'm a journalism professor and science journalist, and though I've written for Wired once or twice (and I happen to know and like Wired's editor, Chris Anderson), I was a relatively neutral, outside party who could check Lehrer's blog for journalistic malfeasance. So Wired.com asked me to take a look.

My task was not to decide whether Lehrer got everything right—every journalist makes mistakes and misinterprets things—but to determine whether he recycled, fabricated, plagiarized, or otherwise breached journalistic ethics.

I soon came to the conclusion that he had.

Wired.com decided not to publish my full analysis of my findings, but........

[Cincinatus' Wife]

Violations of Editorial Standards Found in WIRED Writer’s Blog

[TEXOKIE]

Interesting find to document the ongoing erosion of journalism.

[IbJensen]

Jonah Liar. He is like all leftist imbeciles and probably never had an original thought in his life.

The New Yorker was a fairly honorable and humorous magazine up until sixty years ago.

Now it’s an expensive piece of trash.

[ImJustAnotherOkie]

It would seem that today, any journalist who wants to uncover misdeeds should have a field day. The vast majority of the current crop is just spouting dogma letting the bad guys run amok.

James O’Keefe is a perfect example. He has no problem day after day uncovering one scandal after another.

[JCG]

We've seen so many lefties get busted for similar crimes: Jayson Blair, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Stephen Glass, Janet Cooke, Mike Barnicle. But do we ever see any conservative writers pilloried for the same? I can't recall any.

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[catnipman]

The weird thing is that the average AP writer does what Jonah did day in and day out, it’s just that they are far more subtle and clever about it. They twist facts beyond truthfulness rather than simply making stuff up, and by choosing what they DON’T report, they can have exactly the same impact as if they had out and out lied. Also, most AP writers are clever enough that they can rephrase their source material so that no hint of plagiarism is evident.

Jonah’s real sin, of course, is that he wasn’t a good enough of a propagandist not to get caught.

[BradyLS]

We live in an incredible age of information. It’s easy to find and obtain on countless subject. In the past, for a person to be knowledgeable on subjects required subscriptions to esoteric journals, haunting specialized libraries, and keeping your own stash of pertinent books and writings. Now, you can browse the internet and have passable knowledge about a subject inside a week with virtually no effort.

Yet instead of using this easy access vast information to create fresh, new work, it seems like the technology is used simply to regurgitate _old_ material.

...Or is it simply easier nowadays to catch the cheats in the act???

[SunkenCiv]

thanks Cincinatus’ Wife.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonah_Lehrer

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_wright_show/2012/08/20/confronting_jonah_lehrer.html